Sunday, July 3, 2011

Last week, Jason Kottke tracked the fate of the Oxford comma at Oxford. Oxford University Press is for the comma. But the university’s “Branding toolkit” recommends the comma’s use only when such use clarifies a sentence’s meaning. My take: using the Oxford comma makes sense. If you always include it, you simplify in a small way the work of writing, and you never run the risk of unintended ambiguity.

Also in the news: the exclamation point, in a New York Timessurvey of e-mail habits. I think that sparing use of the exclamation point in work-related e-mail can be a good thing. “Thanks!” seems to suggest more-deeply-felt gratitude than “Thanks.” (The sample student-to-professor e-mail in my post on how to e-mail a professor has such a “Thanks!”) Much depends upon the conventions of a workplace: in the land of the low-key and terse, “Thanks!” will likely sound bubbly and overcaffeinated; in a more spirited environment, “Thanks” might sound begrudging. And In the right (or wrong) context, any expression of gratitude is likely to sound passive-aggressive:

I'm all in favor of the Oxford comma, to the point where I can't think of an instance in which it doesn't help to clarify the meaning of a sentence. Regrettably, the magazine to which I most often contribute eschews the terminal comma in almost every instance, requiring me to remove it from my work just before I submit. Terribly confusing, and I dare say there are folks around Oxford who are now in the same boat.

Especially now that so many of us publish on-line, the need to save space (which commas do take up, in print) is now moot. Shouldn't this new reality give us further license to use Oxford commas -- even to render ourselves commatose?

“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. It is, to my mind, one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by
e-mail.

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